The Selling of "Free Trade": NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy

by John R. MacArthur

Book Overview

The Selling of "Free Trade" shows how Washington works to accomplish political or economic goals, even when confronted with widespread popular opposition. John R. MacArthur chronicles the brutal and expensive campaign in 1993 that led to passage of the poorly understood, highly controversial law creating the North American Free Trade Agreement.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520231783
• ISBN13: 9780520231788
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 412 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

The silent majority

This book had no recommendations, no dust jacket, and no introduction to the qualifications of the author. The only reason I picked it up out of the library was because I am currenty a student of International Business and Global Economics.Our group assigment is to pursue a debate upon free trade in general, for the opposition. For it's treatment of trade theory, especially Smith and Ricardo,I thought MacArthur picked up a salient point...why in the modern world of technology and global trade are thinking individuals (for example...academics?) silently allowing a group of self-interested multi-national corporations to devour and destroy what took western societies, not just capitalists, hundreds of years to attain? Namely, a worker-protected environment, minimum wage laws, and government regulations to prevent exploitation of labour? Vanishing due to greed. The same old greed that could be scientifically theorized upon more than two hundred years ago, during the ages of mercantilism and comparative advantage. Why no new theories on how to maintain worker rights? MacArthur identifies the players in American politics, the benefits assumed and trade among all dealers in the free trade debate, and spends as much time as is necessary to capture the attention of the reader. Canada and Mexico are mere pawns here in a game the Americans play much better than many nations. Thus clear causes and effects of the support of free trade in these other nations should be reviewed in numerous other texts. The points he picks up the best include the clauses in chapter eleven preventing privatisation of Mexican-held American assets, the collusion of the mass media, the deification of Salinas, etc. The question he raises with the greatest irony, "How could such a trade policy be permitted without minimum standards of environmental and labour regulations in the developing country, as was required in the EU of Portugal and Greece?" Finally, the idea should be about creating wider consumer markets of products, which due to this trade deal, almost certainly will never happen in Mexico. The experts still remain silent about the after-effects, research classified into documents that claim the success of the project will take fifteen to twenty years to adequately assess...waiting for those accountable to pass away? Not a great sucking sound, but a slow, persistent dripping sound. Now I know why one of my co-workers in the desert was from Georgetown University. Idealism dies pretty fast in MacArthur's lens upon Free Trade. An enlightening read.

A Good Read!

John MacArthur, editor of Harper's Magazine, is a persistent, resourceful, and thorough reporter with an unapologetic opinion about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). MacArthur makes no attempt to disguise his disdain for the trade pact, which he describes as a measure designed to institutionalize U.S. exploitation of Mexican workers, or for the politicians, businessmen and lobbyists who supported it. In researching this book, MacArthur interviewed many of the key national and international players who helped create NAFTA and found rare interviews with others. He illustrates the debate by presenting an analysis of NAFTA's impact on workers at a U.S factory, and on the Mexicans who replace them. Ironically, he paints such an effective portrait of the inner workings of the Mexican maquiladoras factories that U.S. business leaders reading this book might be further enticed to relocate. The finest feature of the book is its exhaustive treatment of the law-making process, and its lucid judgment of the Washington establishment. We [...] recommend this book to students of politics or international trade, business leaders interested in gaining insight into the anti-globalization movement, and to anyone trying to get a bill passed in the U.S. Congress.

The Stench of the Inner Workings

After reading through the negative reviews below, I can't help but notice that they miss the point. This book is not an anti-globalization rant or a leftie-luddite treatise. What MacArthur has done is document the inner workings of an important "trade agreement," demonstrating that the triumph of the market is not an inevitable historical trend. Rather, the grand sweep of "globalization" is a project, a designed task, pushed through with real and purposive power. The job of pundits, CEOs, PR firms and politicians is to make the rank and file feel like the collapse of non-economic imperatives is the natural unfolding of history. MacArthur's book documents the kinds of things that citizens should be aware of as they happen, not ten years later in a searing expose. We need to shine a searchlight on our government right now, to uncover the backroom deals and smarmy PR snow-jobs that presently constitute the real substance of American politics. MacArthur's book shows us what to look for.

sell out of nations

MacArthur begins his book from the venerable Swingline Staple Company of Queens, NY, with profiles of employees, union activists, owners over the last 30 years. Not so long a period, but starting at a time when a lattice of low technology manufacturing still ringed the great metropolis and bustled in the lower regions of Manhattan. They provided a modest but sustaining salary and a route to the ladders of American society for generations of immigrants. By the end of that period those societal understandings had given way to a much different order. Swingline moved its operations to the dollar an hour wages and shanty towns of Nogales, Mexico, channeling back product to an American market they were no longer willing to support with their payroll.The author exposes the shell (or shill) game that took over the debate of North American Free Trade. Politicians as diverse as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton cynically assured the electorate that open trade heralded an era of unequaled prosperity and opportunity, propelled by such vacant aphorisms as the 'information economy' or the 'new realities' of global business. The agenda was marketed as 'inevitable'. The neoliberal lobby managed to bamboozle a skeptical public and buy the political establishment. By 1994 this well financed machine had bribed or bullied its way to passage of NAFTA in all three countries. A full-scale reorganization of continental industry ensued, with an attendant labour disenfranchisement, deindustrialization and currency sabotage. The corrupt Salinas regime exemplified the motives of the Free Traders. Mexico's acceptance of their wealthy northern neighbors' largesse of 'investment' was extorted in part by their inability to pay the usurious loans of the IMF and foreign banks. NAFTA has since led to a collapsing peso and living standards that have dropped by a third. That has legions besieging the U.S. border. Free Trade, though, means anything but free movement of labour for impoverished Mexicans. Its profit equation hinges on a desperate, captive work force. In some ways MacArthur's focus on the most ostentatious of Free Trade icons is the book's weakness. Mexico has, after all, no more than 4% of the American GDP. The workers of the maquiladoras are poorly educated and low skilled. It was only the most vulnerable, politically expendable Canadian and American workers who would be sacrificed to NAFTA. Discarding this lynchpin, however, has profound implications to the soundness of any nation's overall socio- economic structure. The more insidious aspects of the Free Trade movement comes from agreements mentioned only in passing in this book. The Tokyo and Uruguay rounds of GATT, the WTO, a myriad of bilateral agreements, operating below public awareness, are devastating the high tech, high paying upper rung of industry-- steel, agriculture, chemicals, automotive, ship building, textiles, electronics, robotics. These processes sustain a sophisticated scientific infrastructu

The death of Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic party

The author of this book clearly shows that NAFTA is not about "free trade," but is in fact an investment agreement designed to protect American multi-national corporations that relocate to Mexico for "cheap labor". Mexico has a GNP about 4% of the U.S. GNP; the only people in Mexico who are able to buy American goods are either in the durg trade or the Mexican government elite. The author tells a story of discarded American workers (Swingline Staplers, Long Island City) who loose their plant and jobs to their Mexican brothers and sisters in the great "cheap labor" camps of the Maquiladora Program. But this is also the terrible story of how Bill Clinton and Co. finished off the party of FDR, and made it the party of "cheap labor" sold to corporate interests for campaign contributions. As I read the book I kept thinking that maybe it's time for the American labor movement to run a candidate for President (Bonier?) and demand a North American Free Labor Agreement that will protect American workers, Mexican workers-and all workers everywhere. And I think such a movement would likely attract many on the American right, who are very anti-authoritarian, and deeply distrustful of what Mussolini called "corporatism"-which is what Mussolini said fascism was all about. Great, thought provoking book. Brovo.